


Interesting, Accomplished, and Noteworthy

by Lionheart261



Category: The Owl House (Cartoon)
Genre: Amity Has a Crush on Luz, Gen, One Shot, Understanding Willow Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:17:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25725748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lionheart261/pseuds/Lionheart261
Summary: It was apparent that choosing Hooty as the subject for his interview project was the worst decision that Gus could have possibly made. Nevertheless, he had to find somebody, now more than ever, and as luck would have it, Amity Blight happened to still be nearby, and perhaps just a bit more willing to open up to a select few.
Relationships: Amity Blight & Gus, Amity Blight/Luz Noceda
Comments: 5
Kudos: 218





	Interesting, Accomplished, and Noteworthy

“Ugh, what am I gonna do?”

Gus walked away from the Owl House dejectedly, mentally berating himself for his foolishness. His interview was due first thing tomorrow, and Hooty had rapidly devolved into a total dead-end. He had a feeling Eda and King wouldn’t enjoy being his second choice after all that work they did to earn his favor. Even if he tried to interview Luz or Willow out of desperation, they were still at the Owl House, and knowing Eda and King, the two may well retaliate against such an act with physical and possibly magical force. He stopped in his tracks to think, assessing how willing he was to risk his personal safety over a class assignment, when he noticed something fluttering off in the sky above him: a red, glittery invitation in the shape of a butterfly, a popular choice of card on the Boiling Isles for the butterflies’ unique magical properties.

“Huh. That’s weird. What’s that doing all the way up...there?” Gus asked himself, just as he looked around to try and determine the butterfly’s point of origin, only to find Amity Blight, walking away from the Owl House in a different direction. No sooner had he registered the top student’s presence than he began to ponder an idea, and with it, his own mixed emotions on the subject.

On the one hand, Gus and Amity’s relationship was almost nonexistent, and not particularly positive at that. He wasn’t even sure if the girl knew his name, or anything else about him aside from his friendship with Willow and Luz. Boscha and her posse had also made fun of him and his friends on many occasions; Amity’s association with them did her no favors in his eyes. To top it all off, there was everything Amity herself had done to his closest friends. Driving Willow away when they were kids, almost getting Luz dissected, mocking both of them several times; heck, as far as he could tell, she had just finished fixing the damage she herself had done to Willow’s brain! By all rights, he shouldn’t like her, and frankly, he didn’t. And yet...

On the other hand, something had seemed...different about Amity as of late. When he and Luz had barged in and caught Amity trying to put out the fire she had started, she had looked worried, obviously, but not in the way he had expected. She didn’t look worried the way a student might be about the prospect of getting in trouble, especially at a school as harsh on troublemakers as Hexside. Rather, she looked like she was worried about disappointing someone, someone whose opinion of her was very important. And, judging from the hand-holding so frequent that even he had noticed it in the middle of his frantic cramming, Gus knew who that someone was. The potential implications of  **that** were a whole separate can of worms, which he was gonna have to sort out his feelings on when he didn’t have a project due tomorrow.

Adding on to everything, when he got right down to it, he had to admit that she was probably his best bet for a last-minute interview subject. She was the top student of their year: accomplished. She was a Blight, the youngest daughter of a family known all over the Boiling Isles for their wealth, status, and influence: noteworthy. And, even in the face of all his misgivings about her...she was proving slightly more interesting than he had first figured. 

And, ultimately, he couldn’t afford to be picky at this point.

“Hey, Amity! Wait up!”

Amity turned around in time to see Gus running towards her, pencil and notepad in hand after he scrambled to pick them back up. As he approached, she simply stood there with uncertainty written all over her face. She was disappointed to note that her old protective instincts kicked in for a split second, but she was able to stop herself before she tried putting on her usual mask, and instead relaxed into a more natural expression. She could be herself around Luz’s friends, she reasoned. Or, at least, part of herself.

“Hello, Gus,” she said awkwardly once he reached her, clearly trying to be friendly yet also not knowing what to say. “Do you, uh, do you need something?”

Gus, preoccupied with catching his breath after running so fast, still found himself chuckling a bit, pleasantly surprised. So she did know his name.

“Yeah,” he said, with a slight gasp. “My interview project...I really need to interview someone. Anyone! Immediately!”

Amity’s eyes couldn’t help but widen. Truthfully, she had only dimly been paying attention to Gus’ situation during the recent crisis, for understandable reasons. Still... “You want to interview me?” she asked, a slight blush forming on her cheeks. “I would have assumed you’d want to interview, I dunno, Luz.” Amity knew she would, at least, if she were in Gus’ place. A human on the Boiling Isles was a far more interesting subject than her, let alone one as unique and incredible as Luz Noceda. There were still so many questions Amity wanted to ask her, questions she was strangely too nervous to ask out of the blue. How did she get to the Boiling Isles? How did she wind up staying with Eda? What was her life like back in the human realm? How long has she been a fan of The Good Witch Azura?

Did she have a crush on anyone?

Gus raised an eyebrow at Amity’s reaction, but answered her question promptly nonetheless. “I’m not sure that’s the safest option for me at the moment,” Gus said, glancing back guiltily in the direction of the Owl House. “Besides, my teacher wanted us to ‘get out of our comfort zones’ when it came to selecting someone to interview. He didn’t want us going around interviewing friends or family, if we could help it.” He looked at Amity with a less-than-neutral expression, one that only heightened Amity’s enduring pangs of guilt over everything she had done.

“...I see,” Amity replied simply, only barely able to disguise the unexpected pain she felt. His reaction made sense, she thought. Just because Willow was willing to give her a chance didn’t mean Gus had to, and Gus had his own reasons for not liking her. Still, for some reason, it hurt that one of Luz’s friends didn’t like her, even though she knew that such an attitude was completely justified by her past behavior. It made her doubt whether she deserved to be counted as one of Luz’s friends.

Gus noticed the look on Amity’s face and winced, realizing that his response may have been more callous than necessary. “Look, if you got places to be, I can risk it. Just need to prep a couple clones just in case, and-”

“It’s alright,” Amity interrupted, just when Gus had been about to draw a blue spell circle in the air. She rubbed her shoulder and awkwardly looked down at the ground for a second before looking back up at Gus. “I...I’d be happy to help,” she said, meaning it.

Gus’ eyes widened a bit. “Oh! Oh, uh, okay. Neat,” he said, awkwardly glancing around for a second as he tried to figure out what to say next. “Do you, uh, wanna sit down somewhere, or-?”

“Hm? Uh, yeah, sure,” Amity said, having spaced out for a second. “We can sit down, uh...there,” she added, pointing towards a tree stump and two small logs in the distance.

“Alright. Cool,” Gus said, before the two walked towards the stump in awkward silence, neither of them entirely sure about the other. Eventually, the two arrived, taking a seat on opposite sides of the tree stump while Gus set down his notepad briefly. “Would you...care for some refreshments?” he asked, wanting to be polite. His aggressive approach with Eda and King earlier clearly hadn’t produced much in the way of results. Plus, he imagined that fixing someone else’s memories (that you broke) took a lot of work.

“Wait, you can do that?” Amity asked, legitimately surprised and curious. She knew that illusion magic covered object materialization in addition to actual illusions, but from her limited studies on the subject, she had assumed that was rather advanced magic. Her siblings couldn’t do it, she knew that much; if they could, she and her parents would never know a moment’s peace.

Gus, realizing that Amity was actually intrigued and not maliciously mocking his abilities, simply grinned. “What would you like?” he asked, a little eager for a chance to show off his own particular talents. Gus knew that illusion magic wasn’t as flashy as other kinds of magic, but he also knew from the moment he began training to enter Hexside that illusion magic was the most versatile kind of magic out there. Sure, Willow had her mighty plant magic, Luz had her unorthodox spell glyphs, and Amity had her abominations and other spells, but Gus had illusions. And Gus was incredibly good at illusions.

“Um...just a glass of water would be fine, thank you,” Amity replied, appreciating the offer and more than a little eager to see such advanced illusion magic in action. On cue, Gus drew a small blue magic circle in the air, snapping his fingers as soon as it was completed. In a small flash of blue light, a cup of what appeared to be water, complete with two ice cubes, materialized on the tree stump in front of Amity. Reaching out for it cautiously, Amity’s fingers brushed against the glass, confirming that the cup and its contents were real. Fascinated, Amity drew the glass towards her face and wafted with her other hand, in an effort to make sure that the contents of the glass were safe. Finally, Amity drew the glass to her lips and took a light sip, her eyes widening as she tasted the clear, fresh water that Gus had brought into existence.

“Satisfied?” Gus asked, like a magician asking the crowd about their performance. 

Amity smiled, a genuine smile which indicated her astonishment at Gus’ talent. “This is very impressive,” she said, in such a way that Gus knew she meant every word.

“Thanks,” Gus said, before assuming a more serious expression. “Alright, are you ready to get started?” Amity nodded as she continued sipping on her manufactured drink, causing Gus to nod in turn. “Now, if I’m gonna get a good grade on this, I’m gonna need a lot of material to work with. Therefore, I’d appreciate it if you could provide complete answers to my questions to the best of your ability...to the extent that you’re comfortable, obviously.” He paused in order to make sure that Amity had heard all of that. “Do you think you can do that?”

Amity thought the question over for a moment, wondering if she had perhaps gotten slightly in over her head. Opening up to Luz had been hard enough, and there were still a number of things she wasn’t quite ready to reveal to the human girl, or anyone else, for that matter. She had only just gotten on friendlier terms with Willow, and was hopefully starting to do the same with Gus? Her siblings knew her better than most, but that wasn’t saying much, and her former ‘friends’ hardly knew her at all outside of the front she presented. All in all, agreeing to a personal interview at this stage in her life might not have been the soundest decision.

As she thought about all of these things, however, she glanced around and spotted the butterfly invitation she had sent fluttering off into the night sky. It was common knowledge that such invitations were rather flighty, being created using real creatures and thus having a tendency to take rather unusual flight paths. At the moment, it had circled around from where it had been when Gus had noticed it, and now flew in front of the Owl House’s eye-shaped stained glass window, which Amity could see vaguely from where she was sitting. 

Seeing the butterfly fly past the curious building made Amity think of the curious girl who lived inside it, a girl she still couldn’t quite figure out. Amity must have made the worst impression possible on her when they first met, and yet Luz still extended her a hand and an offer of friendship time and time again. It was Luz that had shown her that it was okay to let down her walls just a little. And then a little more. And a little more. It wasn’t easy, and she still struggled against the urge to throw her walls back up, as that day’s events had demonstrated several times. Even so...Luz had proven that keeping them down might be better for Amity in the long run. At this point, Amity was inclined to agree. So, with thoughts of her completely platonic new friend still firmly rooted in her mind, Amity turned back to Gus and found the words to answer his question.

“Yeah. I think I could stand to open up a little.”

* * *

Phew, almost forgot to upload this!

I've been heavily invested in The Owl House for a while now, and I've been itching to write some fics about the series. Ultimately, this fic came about partly because I didn't care too much for the Gus subplot in Understanding Willow, and partly because I just felt the need to write **something**. I've got other ideas, but I dunno whether or not I'll have the energy to actually write them. Guess we'll have to wait and see on that. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy this fic, and be sure to leave kudos and your thoughts in the comments below. With all that said, have a fantastic day, stay safe, wear a mask, and take care.


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